Third Witness Says Demjanjuk Was Treblinka Guard ‘ivan’

A third witness identified accused war criminal John Demjanjuk Tuesday as the Treblinka death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”

Yosef Tcherny, 61, who was sent to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto when he was 16, told the Jerusalem district court that he had seen Demjanjuk many times operating the gas chambers in which nearly 900,000 Jews perished.

Tcherny said he was put to work sorting out the possessions of those who died and later became the “camp Jew,” a servant to the Germans and Ukrainians who ran the camp, the butt of their jokes and target of their kicks and blows.

He wept when he told how a dog the Germans named “Mensch” (Human) was set upon the prisoners with the command, “Mensch, get the dogs.” Two other prosecution witnesses, Eliahu Rosenberg and Pinhas Epstein, identified Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible” earlier in the trial.